China and the World: A Comparative Media Perspective

Much of modern Chinese studies revolves around the question of China’s place in the world. The specific terms of the debate vary: Chinese literature “and/as” world literature, global “Asias,” notions of the “Sinophone” and “Sinosphere,” and so on. But in each case, the end goal is to demonstrate why and how China should matter to the world outside China—a goal that speaks, in turn, to the continued influence of area studies, its insistence on treating China as the “inflection” of or “exception” to Euro-American norms.
This panel approaches the China/world debate through the lens of comparative media. Such a lens can counteract the literary bias in Chinese studies, a bias evidenced both in the way we do scholarship (e.g., the assumption that we “read” texts) and in the institutions playing host to our scholarship (e.g., the field’s flagship journals, which are all primarily literary). More broadly (and by extension), a comparative paradigm can help us desegregate. Scholars of literature debate China’s contributions to world literature, scholars of film the extent to which Chinese cinema is transnational, scholars of theater China’s place in global theater—yet little dialogue exists between these different mediatic silos, despite the similar questions being asked. 
In enabling such dialogue, the question of medium shifts the focus of our scholarship from what to how, from the content of China’s relationship with the world to the means by which this relationship is established. Given that different media can use different tools to represent and convey meaning (words, shots, bodies, etc.), fully answering the question of how requires the very sort of comparative analysis this panel advocates.
We invite papers that address questions like (but not limited to) the following: 
- What kinds of technologies, platforms, semiotic tools, and/or representational techniques do different media use to address the question of China, and how exactly do they use them?
- What sorts of methodological challenges would a comparative analysis of different media entail? How would such a comparative perspective interact with the conventional area studies paradigm?
- To what extent does medium impact circulation and reception (whether within or outside China)?
- In what ways has medium shaped the discursive landscape of “China”—a landscape composed, among other things, of longstanding traditions of Orientalism, increasingly heterogeneous conceptions of “Chineseness” as an identity (Sinophone, Global Asias, etc.), and growing perceptions of China as an environmental or geopolitical “threat” (via COVID-19, pollution, conflicts in the South China Sea, the Belt and Road Initiative, etc.)?
- How might a comparative media perspective change our pedagogy, the ways in which we teach China in the classroom?